The Bionutrient Meter
A Prototype, and what it proved.
We began this project from a few basic observations: that the nutritional quality of our food has declined over time, and that this has coincided with a rise in physical, psychological and emotional ailments linked to nutrient deficiency. We also recognized that money is a powerful force in the world, and that the economics of food have long been dominated by yield and cost rather than nutritional quality.
The Bionutrient Meter was our prototype to test a single question: could nutritional quality be measured quickly, cheaply and non-invasively? It was never a product. It was built to prove what was possible, and it is no longer in production.
How it worked
In many ways the device was shockingly simple. The Bionutrient Meter was a handheld spectrometer that worked on the principle of spectroscopy. It used LEDs, light emitting diodes, to emit light at very specific wavelengths, which then bounced off an object such as a carrot, carrot pulp, spinach or soil.
Some of that light was absorbed and turned into other forms of energy, like heat, and a light sensor read how much bounced back at each wavelength, quickly and many times within a single measurement.
Why did that matter? The way light bounces off an object is a characteristic that correlates directly with the chemical compounds it is made of. In food and agriculture, there are known correlations between reflectance at specific wavelengths and the amounts of different nutrients (vitamins, antioxidants and aromatic compounds among them), the level of organic carbon in soil, and the chlorophyll content of plants. Because these signals overlap with one another, it took a great deal of data to parse out what was driving each response.
Who Built it
The concept, design and creation were a collaboration between the Bionutrient Food Association and Our Sci, LLC. From concept to design to manufacturing, our teams worked tirelessly to bring forward a technology that would let people measure their food at home with a handheld device. From 2018, we gathered thousands of soil, food and crop samples through our Grower Partner and Citizen Science programs to improve the calibrations of the latest version of the meter. By modelling the light bouncing off crop samples against lab-derived values for antioxidants and polyphenols, the meter was used to estimate nutrient density.
The meter was only ever one part of the wider strategy, which also included an open-source data platform, owned by no company or individual, with the data held in the commons for everyone to access. Our small but mighty team in Michigan took all the parts and assembled, calibrated, packaged and shipped the meters, using a 3D printer for the case and a contracted factory in China for the boards. In all, around 300 Bionutrient Meters were built and sold as prototype units, enough to prove the concept in real-world use and to gather the data that validated it. It remained a prototype throughout, and was never developed into a commercial product.
How it compared with the Brix Meter
A refractometer, or Brix meter, was for many generations the best tool available for assessing the relative quality of fruits and vegetables. It measures the dissolved solids in a liquid, including sugars, vitamins, minerals, proteins and hormones, and gives a general sense of how much nutrient activity is present in a leaf or a harvested fruit. But using one meant squishing or juicing the crop, which was awkward for two reasons: some vegetables give up their juice only with great effort (imagine pressing a single drop from a winter squash), and ideally we still want to be able to eat our food after measuring it.
A spectrometer, by flashing light at a crop and reading what bounced back, could assess the levels and ratios of a far broader range of elements and compounds, and so offered a more sophisticated analysis than a refractometer.
How the Bionutrient Meter differed from the SCiO
The meter worked on the same principle as the SCiO, but where the SCiO reads only the near-infrared, the Bionutrient Meter looked across UV, visible and near-infrared light. Because every element and compound vibrates at a different frequency, this gave a view into a broader spectrum of information. The SCiO was a closed, proprietary model, whereas the Bionutrient Meter was open source. It could read leaves, roots, fruits, soil and liquids alike, whether from a growing plant or from the supermarket shelf.
What it proved
The work on the Bionutrient Meter culminated in a peer-reviewed paper in the Nature Portfolio journal Scientific Reports, Validation of Low-Cost Reflectometer to Identify Phytochemical Accumulation in Food Crops, which demonstrated that low-cost, non-invasive measurement of nutrient accumulation in food crops is possible.
Where it led
Proving it was possible was the beginning, not the end. The meter, and the data it gathered, opened the way to the Variation Study: our large survey of how much nutritional quality varies across the food supply. It showed the differences are vast, and that soil health, more than any label, is the strongest predictor of a food's nutrient density.
That evidence led us to define nutrient density properly, one crop at a time, starting with beef. The Beef Study became our first full definition project and the proof that a rigorous, peer-reviewed 1 to 100 standard could be built.
And beef made the larger need clear.
To measure nutrient density anywhere, in real time, the world first needs a shared, agreed scale for every device and laboratory to calibrate against.
That is why we embarked on the Global Treaty for the Definition of Nutrient Density in Food, the work that defines the standard those meters measure against.